Author: Thomas

Static analysis is a way of automatically analysing code without executing it. As a development team, this is really powerful as once the static analysis software is up, running and integrated with your deployment pipelines you can gain an extra tester in your team with little ongoing maintenance! While some of the issues static analysis software finds are not always high value (code styling for example) some are issues your engineers are less likely to notice such as obscure security flaws and out of date dependencies. SonarQube; A Static Analysis Tool SonarQube is a static analysis tool that I have been using and…

When working in a microservice architecture it can be hard to verify the whole system end to end due to all the moving parts involved. Often the purported solution to this is to write integration tests which verify a couple bits of the system at the same time with the test mocked out. If all these subsections of the system pass their respective integration tests we can be confident in the system, right? The Problem with Integration Tests Integration tests are a good way of verifying our system as they use real (not mocked out) components but quite a lot…

Recently I was updating the UI tests in a project now Selenium Webdriver plays nice with .NET Core. And came across a strange error: View the code on Gist. What made this a strange error is it is a failure to communicate with the Webdriver Server, not my underlying application and because of this failure in communication Webdriver could not manipulate my website. The Fix After some googling, this turns out to be a straightforward fix – my project uses the Chromedriver server as it’s Webdriver for tests and simply the Chromedriver server executable I had locally was out of date when…

The Question When would you not use BDD tests like Specflow? This is a question I have often asked and been asked in interviews and it is a great one because it challenges the candidate to be critical of a practice which has a lot of a good press and isn’t something the candidate is likely to have a prepared answer for. Behavior Driven Development tests using tools like Specflow and Cucumber are a useful means to create tests but should the technique always be applied? Skills Assessed Critical Analysis Industry Awareness Explaining Concepts Peer-Driven Debate Answering the Question Like most interview questions…

Upgrading from IdentityServer 3 to 4 isn’t too tricky but there are some traps you can fall into if you are not careful. Type Changes Scopes are now API Resources Scopes in IdentityServer 3 were used to define a resource and the secret required to get access to that resource. Now, this class has been updated to an API Resource as an example of how the new object might look like: View the code on Gist. As you can see above the Scopes are now handled as a property of an API Resource. Clients now request an API Resource and…

While I was migrating an ASP.NET Core 1 project to version 2 my authentication code stopped working. After some investigation I kept running across this info message in my application logs which seemed unusual: View the code on Gist. The Fix Turns out this is a simple issue to fix. Just make sure that in the Configure() method in the Startup class contains a call to app.UseAuthentication() before the call to app.UseMvc() for example: View the code on Gist. With this method updated to include the Authentication middleware, the issue should be resolved.

I believe it is a reasonable prediction that QA is one part of the software industry which will be disrupted by Machine Learning. And the role of a QA engineer will change as a result so it is important to have a grasp on the basics. This post will give you a high-level introduction to machine learning and the companies in the space working on changing how we assure quality. What is Machine Learning Arthur Samuel a pioneer in Artifical Intelligence supposedly defined Machine Learning as: Machine learning is a field of computer science that gives computers the ability to learn…

XUnit is a free open source unit testing tool for .NET written by the original inventor of NUnit v2 which is great to work with and supports .NET Core, however, how it handles clean up is slightly different to other test frameworks you may have used. What is a TearDown Method? If you haven’t done much-automated testing before then you may not know what a TearDown method is. Typically its the method responsible for cleaning up after your test(s) have run. For example, an integration test might create data which is persisted to a database. Afterwards, this needs to be purged of data…

ASP.Net core lets you run a web server for your web application from the command line with the command: dotnet run But there is no command argument passing the port to listen on. For example in Ruby on Rails you could specify the port with the –port (-p) argument: rails server –port 2000 Instead, ASP.Net Core uses the environment variable ASPNETCORE_URLS to take a string representation of the port and hostname of the server. If you want to change the port that the server listens on at the command line you will need to set the environment variable. Which you can do within the scope of the…

What is Anaconda? Anaconda is both a data science platform and distribution of Python. But its also a nice way of managing multiple versions of Python and Virtual Environments (in the same way as VirtualEnv). Installing To install go to the Anaconda Downloads page and download the version dependent on the version of Python you would like. I used the graphical installer which is really straightforward. Only Use Anaconda Python in an Anaconda Virtual Environment Once the install is complete if you reload your terminal and check your python version (assuming you installed Python 3): > python3 -V >> Python 3.4.5 ::…